Sanctifying the Border: Religious Nationalism and the Moral Politics of Exclusion in Poland

The article notes that the sources of legitimacy were different in ancient and medieval times than today. It is emphasized that the concept of legitimacy in China emerged from a complex interplay of philosophical ideas, cultural beliefs, and historical precedents. The Mandate of Heaven, Confucianism, and legalism each provided different sources through which rulers sought to legitimize their authority. In ancient Greece, the concept of legitimacy arose from a combination of civic participation, philosophical thoughts, mythological narratives, and the pursuit of virtue. In ancient India, however, the concept of legitimacy was deeply rooted in the rich tapestry of spiritual, social and philosophical ideals. Dharma served as a spiritual compass that guided rulers to maintain cosmic order and ethical principles. The article also notes that the sources of legitimacy in ancient Rome were multifaceted, based on a combination of mythology, legal foundations, religious symbolism, and the ability to ensure stability and prosperity. In medieval Europe, the concept of legitimacy was shaped by the complex dynamics of feudal relations, religious beliefs, and evolving political structures. In medieval Islam, the concept of legitimacy was deeply rooted in the caliphate, the implementation of the Sharia and the pledge of allegiance. The interaction of political and religious factors determined the sources of legitimacy, emphasizing the importance of rulers to rule according to Islamic principles. The scientific result of the article, the novelty and importance of the work is that it shows how the concept of legitimacy changes over time and space and the impact of these changes on the management structure of societies. The author emphasizes that the sources of legitimacy in ancient and medieval times, unlike in the modern era, originated more from religious, philosophical and cultural contexts. The novelty of the work is the comparative presentation of specific models of legitimacy in ancient China, Greece, India and Rome, as well as in medieval Europe and the Islamic world. The main hypothesis is that the sources of legitimacy were formed according to the social, economic and ideological realities of the time and had a direct impact on the management mechanisms. The importance of the work is that it provides an opportunity to better understand the dynamics of legitimacy in the modern era and build effective governance structures by learning from its historical models. This approach creates a new perspective for both philosophical and political-legal studies.

The article discusses functions of the Polish national emblem in the context of political and religious symbolism in Poland. The examination of the Polish emblem - the white eagle - in its historical development provides a background to understanding various aspects of the national and political ideology. Through the analysis of different structural forms of the emblem, composed of various symbolic elements in changing combinations, an interpretation is made of the political process in Poland. A specific feature of this process was the fact that both sides of the political conflict between the regime and the democratic opposition used the same national symbols, but in different structural contexts, thus giving them different, sometimes contradictory meanings.

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume II, Orisa, Stewart scrutinizes the West African heritage and religious imagination of Yoruba-Orisa devotees in Trinidad from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and explores their meaning-making traditions in the wake of slavery and colonialism. She investigates the pivotal periods of nineteenth-century liberated African resettlement, the twentieth-century Black Power movement, and subsequent campaigns for the civil right to religious freedom in Trinidad. Disrupting syncretism frameworks, Stewart probes the salience of Africa as a religious symbol and the prominence of Africana nations and religious nationalisms in projects of black belonging and identity formation, including those of Orisa mothers. Contributing to global womanist thought and activism, Yoruba-Orisa spiritual mothers disclose the fullness of the black religious imagination’s affective, hermeneutic, and political capacities.

This study explores the impact of religious nationalism on domestic portfolio investment within a country. Examining data from 36 developed and emerging markets spanning the period of 2004-2021, the results suggest that investors from countries with significant religious nationalism sentiment tend to allocate a greater portion of their portfolio to domestic equities, leading to less international diversified portfolios. Religious nationalism promotes cultural uniformity and the preservation of traditional values, prioritizing the protection of religious symbols and customs over embracing innovation. Furthermore, the findings indicate that religious nationalism exacerbates religious discrimination against minority religions, thereby increasing investments in home markets. Moreover, I illustrate that religious nationalism is particularly relevant in emerging markets.

Truly Free Consent? On the Nature of Duty to Obey

The role of religion in the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina has been both obvious and invisible. It was obvious in that both perpetrators and victims of organized atrocities were identified by their religious tradition. It was invisible in that the religious manifestations were viewed either as incidental or as masks for deeper social, political, and economic issues; or else categorized exclusively as aspects of ethnicity. This essay examines the role of religion in the ideology of those carrying out ”ethnic cleansing,“ as manifested in the literature of the religious nationalists and, particularly in the case of Catholic religious nationalism, in the language of destruction and construction of shrines. Juxtaposed to the shrine texts of religious nationalism is a vision of shrine preservation and reconstruction. The reconstruction efforts are viewed by their advocates as central to the construction of a pluriform Bosnia-Hercegovina in which all religions historically integral to Bosnian civilization will be viewed as equal and equally important elements of the national identity. By examining the struggle between these two visions of sacral monuments, we can better understand and evaluate the agency of religious institutions, leaders, and symbols in the Bosnian drama.

This article argues that how the United Nations (UN) conceptualizes legitimacy is not only a matter of legalism or power politics. The UN’s conception of legitimacy also utilizes concepts, language and symbolism from the religious realm. Understanding the entanglement between political and religious concepts and the ways of their verbalization at the agential level sheds light on how legitimacy became to be acknowledged as an integral part of the UN and how it changes. At the constitutional level, the article examines phrases and ‘verbal symbols’, enshrined in the Charter of the ‘secular church’ UN. They evoke intrinsic legitimacy claims based on religious concepts and discourse such as hope and salvation. At the agential level, the article illustrates how the Secretary-General verbalizes those abstract constitutional principles of legitimacy. Religious language and symbolism in the constitutional framework and agential practice of the UN does not necessarily produce an exclusive form of legitimacy. This article shows, however, that legitimacy as nested in the UN’s constitutional setting cannot exist without religious templates because they remain a matter of a ‘cultural frame’.

Salvation by Legitimation in the United Nations

In a recent article, Arthur Applbaum contributes a new view—legitimacy as a moral power—to the debate over the concept of political legitimacy. Applbaum rejects competing views of legitimacy, in particular legitimacy as a claim-right to have the law obeyed, for mistakenly invoking substantive moral argument in the conceptual analysis, and concludes that “at the core of the concept—what legitimacy is” is only a Hohfeldian moral power. In this article, I contend that: (1) Applbaum’s view of legitimacy, when fully unfolded, refers to more than a mere moral power and should therefore be rejected even by his own standards; (2) Applbaum’s rejection of competing views of legitimacy ultimately relies on a claim that he does not successfully defend, namely, the claim that moral duties are of absolute rather than prima facie force.

The main purpose: The main purpose of the article is to substantiate the basic approaches to the interpretation of political ethics and to explore their visualization and interpretation in the cinema. Methodology: The framework of this article consist comprehensive multidisciplinary approach and methodological tools developed by M. Mamardashvili, А. Badiou, S. Zizek, C. Schmitt, M. Nussbaum, P. Sloterdijk, and R. Taller. The scientific novelty of the research is founded on distinguishing the ethics of individual and political ethics, which is conceptualized through interaction with other people, on the one hand, and institutions, on the other hand. The ethics of duty, the ethics of human rights, the ethics of economic necessity, bioethics, ethics of public opinion, ethics of institutions were found out. Conclusion : It was proved that ethics as a universal concept does not exist. It is concretized in clear situations and dilemmas while gaining a political definition. Therefore, all ethics can be considered as a political ethics. Several types of political ethics, including ethics of duty, ethics of human rights, economic necessity ethics, bioethics, ethics of public opinion, institutions ethics have been described in the research. The article explained how ethics can be transformed into political ethics on the ground of visualization in cinema. Eventually, several variations of political ethics have been interpreted on the basis of cinema, have been formed the boundaries of privacy inthem.

Mario Bunge calls his ethical system agathonism, to signify “seeking the good”. For Bunge the good is above all else the satisfaction of human needs. In this way, human needs act as the foundation stone of Bunge’s ethical system. The aim of this chapter is to reset the foundation stone of agathonism, while allowing the valuable portions of the edifice to remain. Space limitations leave fulfilment of the latter as an exercise for the reader. Consequently, this chapter is mostly of a critical nature. New characterizations of rights, moral duties, and the relation between rights and duties are proposed.

The term ‘political legitimacy’ is unfortunately ambiguous. One serious source of confusion is the failure to distinguish clearly between political legitimacy and political authority and to conflate political authority with authoritativeness. I will distinguish between (1) political legitimacy, (2) political authority, and (3) authoritativeness. I will also articulate two importantly different variants of the notion of political authority. Having drawn these distinctions, I will argue first that political legitimacy, rather than political authority, is the more central notion for a theory of the morality of political power. My second main conclusion will be that where democratic authorization of the exercise of political power is possible, only a democratic government can be legitimate. Another ambiguity is also a source of confusion. Sometimes it is unclear whether ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a descriptive or a normative sense. In this article I am concerned exclusively with legitimacy in the normative sense, not with the conditions under which an entity is believed to be legitimate. However, a normative account of legitimacy is essential for a descriptive account. Unless one distinguishes carefully between political legitimacy, political authority, and authoritativeness, one will not be clear about what beliefs in legitimacy are beliefs about.

Twenty Years of PostcommunismDeepening Dissatisfaction Ivan Krastev (bio) It was "the best of years." Reflecting on the historical significance of Central Europe's revolutions, Robert Cooper wrote that "the year 1989 divides the past from the future almost as clearly as the Berlin Wall divided the East from the West."1 The revolutions of '89 turned the will of the people as expressed in free and fair elections into the only source of legitimate government that modern societies were ready to accept. Centuries-old arguments critical of the desirability or feasibility of democratic regimes virtually disappeared. Democracy may not have run out of enemies, but it ran out of critics. The revolutionary crowds on the streets of Prague and East Berlin—peaceful, triumphant, and insisting on their right to live in a "normal society"—provided the ultimate validation for the superiority of liberal democracy as a form of government. The contradictions that had been afflicting Europe's democratic experience over the last two centuries seemed finally to have reached a resolution. Inspired by the spread of democratic regimes following the demise of communism, political theorists became more interested in the process of democratization than in the transformations taking place within existing democracies. In the years immediately following 1989, little attention was paid to the impact of that year's epochal events on the way that democracy was beginning to be perceived by its own citizens. No longer was democracy only the least undesirable form of government—the best of a bad bunch, if you will. Instead, it was coming to seem like the best form of government, period. People were starting to look to democratic regimes not merely to save them from something worse, but to deliver freedom, prosperity, and honest and effective governance all in one big package. Today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a growing [End Page 113] ambiguity about the historical significance of 1989 and about the state of democracy in Europe (particularly Central Europe). Trust in democratic institutions (including elections) is steadily declining. The political class is viewed as corrupt and self-interested. Disenchantment with democracy appears to be growing. According to one 2008 survey, only 21 percent of Lithuanians, 24 percent of Bulgarians, 24 percent of Romanians, 30 percent of Hungarians, and 38 percent of Poles believe that they have benefited from the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 The revisionists' hour has arrived. In his new book Uncivil Society, the U.S. historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin powerfully argues that, the Polish case aside, the communist collapse across Central and Eastern Europe is best understood as the implosion of an ineffective and demoralized communist establishment (the "uncivil society" of his title) than by a revolt of civil society.3 The people on the streets of Prague and Sofia were not so much revolutionary citizens as dissatisfied consumers. The idea of civil society has long been a magical construct, one that has somehow succeeded in simultaneously satisfying modernization theorists' belief in the historical mission of the middle class, the New Left's fascination with spontaneous activism, neoliberals' affection for antistatism, and Western donors' fondness for English-speaking NGOs. But today that construct is losing its appeal. 1989 and All That The new wave of revisionism does not limit itself to reappraisals of what really happened in 1989 and who did it. Instead, the revisionists seek in the first place to alter our understanding of who were the overall winners (and who were the net losers) from the change. There are many today who believe that it was not the people but the elites who broke free and collected the jackpot of 1989. The end of communism, this account goes, set in motion a process that has liberated ex-communist elites from fear (of purges), from guilt (for being rich), from ideology, from the chains of community, from national loyalties, and even from the necessity to govern. Was George Orwell right, one wants to ask, when he wrote that "all revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure"?4 My argument here, however, is not that the revolutions of 1989 were a failure. What I...

What are the consequences of the politicization of religious myths and symbols for religious communities? The ethnic cleansing that culminated in the massacre of Srebrenica was promoted to the Serbian population, both in Serbia proper and in Bosnia, through the use of religious mythology and symbols. In Bosnia, religious language lost its meaning, religious observance remained low and it became difficult for religious leaders to join together to address community issues. We see a similar use of religious language and symbolism today in the U.S., particularly from evangelical leaders justifying the current president and his jingoistic actions. We can look to the conflict in Bosnia as a warning to the U.S. not to link religion and nationalism.

Natural law philosophy presents a critique of the positivist conception of law. It defines the law as subject to criteria of (absolute) religious, social, or political justice, leading to a profound intertwinement of the formal validity of law and its moral merits or dismerits. Historically, natural law philosophy can be divided into the classical, scholastic, rationalist, and modern natural law thinking. Here, emphasis is on the more modern variants of natural law thinking. After World War II, several criteria have been suggested for restraining the discretion of the legislator and the courts of justice. Lon L. Fuller forcefully defended the idea of the internal, i.e. institutional or procedural, morality of law. He also made the distinction between the two kinds of morality: the morality of duty and the morality of aspiration. Still, it is only the requirement of due promulgation of laws that is placed under the criteria of a morality of duty, softening the edge of Fuller’s philosophical stance. Moreover, Fuller’s eight criteria for the internal morality of law are better aligned with parliamentary legislation than with judge-made common law, and a totally different set of criteria would be needed for the latter. H. L. A. Hart’s idea of the minimum content of natural law is based on a set of contingent but still true ideas concerning human nature and society. In the light of Hart’s debate with Fuller, I defend the argument that Hart’s idea of the “core of good sense in natural law” ought to be read as a set of technical norms only, devoid of any genuinely moral content. Finally, according to John Finnis, human experience teaches us that there are seven basic values or basic goods that the legislator, courts of justice, and other officials ought to observe, viz. life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability (friendship), practical reasonableness, and “religion”. Contrary to what Finnis writes, the allegedly self-evident, a priori character of such basic values is far from patent, and it seems that Finnis’ line of argument ends up in a logical circle. The greatest value or, depending on the preferences and aversions of the observer, the worst failure of natural law thinking is the intertwinement of the law with religious, political, or social morality.